The addition this week of a new speed test designed to work without any browser plugins has proved popular with over 3000 tests run in just a few days. Over one third of users had iPhones and one quarter are iPhones on EDGE. The front page news article about it is here and an earlier one here. Both articles explain the test.

Somewhat off topic to speedtests: the embodiment of a fully functional browser on a mobile platform has taken a while to arrive but I think the iPhone marks the beginning of the end for 'mobile optimized' sites, WAP, and so on. Technology has simply advanced faster than the complexity and compute/display demand of the web, and the iPhone proves that a hand-held computer with reasonable battery life can indeed run a fully functional browser and meet challenges created by the smaller screen size and lack of keyboard. Any gaps it has (lack of Flash support, for instance) will surely be met with patches or upgrades.

I think this is a relief. Web designs rarely degrade gracefully to small screens with even the most complex style sheets and the latest standards. Ensuring your design is usable on a 40 x 80 character mainly text display was always going to be a headache and now, if other phone makers analyze the iPhone and get with the program, sites can mostly forget about even trying (well, unless the web invades watches). Hooray!

Ultimately webmasters may only have two distinct audiences for their content: carbon based life forms all on fully functional browsers, and computer bots like Googlebot that we must kiss up to in order to get our content correctly and efficiently indexed.